Other backups

This nicely provides the sizes of various backups, and other useful information. Some are ‘signed and verified’ with cryptographic keys, but I’m not sure exactly what that means, and the details matter.

About 90 databases are listed here, along with some size information and some information about whether people have already backed them up or are in process:

Good news! I think it’s not urgent to back up the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). Wikipedia says it’s one of 12 “Distributed Active Archive Centers” funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to archive and distribute data from NASA’s past and current satellites and field measurement programs. It’s based at the University of Colorado Boulder Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES). So, I believe it is already serving as a kind of backup. Trump could shut down this program but I don’t think he could rapidly make the university delete this data. I’ll check.

I am still looking for similar measurements from other space agencies, but haven’t sofar found any. As I wrote I couldn’t find anything similar on russian pages and likewise I haven’t yet found anything on the ESA side.
I dont know about about the chinese, but theirprimary satellite control facility in Xian isn’t even linked to the Wikipedia site.

The United States is a federation of states, and the federal government has limited ability to control what individual states do. The University of Colorado is run by the state of Colorado, not the federal government. So, the only legal way Trump could force researchers there to delete data from their computers is to get Congress to pass a law saying they need to do this (or, for example, that they need to do this to continue to get funds from the federal government). This would be a much slower process than, say, Trump telling NASA to delete all climate databases from their servers.

Of course, all this assumes that Trump doesn’t become the sort of dictator who destroys the existing rules. But that, too, would take some time to happen. Our goal is to get some things done by January 20th, to prevent certain kinds of rapid destruction of data.

Anyways I can only repeat what you do is no “backup” but rather an “emergency measure” and I repeat that I think this should be more communicated as such.

It’s obviously an emergency measure; nobody in the US needs to be told that. Every day brings scary news about the political situation in this country.

@JohnBaez Great job! Don’t forget to also backup things at the Internet Archive (https://archive.org).

Also everyone is centered around backing up climate data, but we should also backup Trump’s own nonsense on climate change (as evidence to add up to his countless lawsuits… who knows? Even Obama is being sued right now for climate change related topics.), so here they are:

In my post Saving climate data (part 2) I explained how people can nominate databases to be backed up by the Internet Archive. Here’s what I said:

Today I helped catalyze a phone conversation between Bethany Wiggin, who heads the PPEHLab, and Nancy Beaumont, head of the Society of American Archivists. Digital archivists have a lot of expertise in saving information, so their skills are crucial here. Big wads of disorganized data are not very useful.

In this conversation I learned that some people are already in contact with the Internet Archive. This archive always tries to save US government websites and databases at the end of each presidential term. Their efforts are not limited to environmental data, and they save not only webpages but entire databases, e.g. data in ftp sites. You can nominate sites to be saved here:

How To Write Math Here:

You need the word 'latex' right after the first dollar sign, and it needs a space after it. Double dollar signs don't work, and other limitations apply, some described here. You can't preview comments here, but I'm happy to fix errors.